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Early life and family

Frick was
born in Alsenz, Bavaria, Germany, the last of
four children of teacher Wilhelm Frick the elder and his wife
Henriette (née Schmidt).He was educated in Kaiserslautern and studied jurisprudence at Heidelberg, graduating in 1901. He joined the Bavarian
civil service in 1903, working as a lawyer at the police
headquarters in Munich. He was made a Bezirksamtassessor
in 1907 and rose to the position of Regierungsassessor by
1917.

In 1910,
Frick married Elisabetha Emilie Nagel (1890 - 1978) in Pirmasens. They had two sons and a daughter. The
marriage ended in an ugly divorce in 1934. Later that year Frick
remarried, to Margarete Schultze-Naumburg (1896 - 1960), the former
wife of Paul
Schultze-Naumburg. Margarete gave birth to a son and a
daughter.

NSDAP career

Wilhelm Frick joined the NSDAP in September
1925 and worked for an insurance company.He took part in the
Beer Hall
Putsch (November 1923), at which time he was director of
the Munich Kriminalpolizei. He was one of those arrested and
imprisoned for the putsch and was tried for
treason in April 1924. He was given a suspended sentence of 15
months' imprisonment and was dismissed from his police job.Frick
was elected to the Reichstag in May 1924 and
associated himself with the radical Gregor Strasser; he climbed to posts of
leadership in the NSDAP, becoming
Fraktionsführer in 1928.

Wilhelm
Frick was appointed Minister of
the Interior and of Education in the state government of
Thuringia during 1930–31, being the first Nazi to hold any
ministerial-level post in pre-Nazi Germany.

When Hitler came to power in January
1933, Frick was appointed Minister of the Interior of the Reich,
one of only three Nazis in the original Hitler Cabinet. He
initially had far less power than his counterparts in the rest of
Europe. For example, he had no authority over the police. In
Germany, law enforcement has traditionally been a state and local
matter.

Frick's power dramatically increased as a result of the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act of 1933. He was
responsible for drafting many of the "Gleichschaltung" laws that consolidated the
Nazi regime. Under the Law for the Reconstruction of the Reich,
which converted Germany into a highly centralized state, the state
governors were responsible to him. By 1935, he also had sole power
to appoint the mayors of all municipalities with populations
greater than 100,000 (except for Berlin and Hamburg, where Hitler
reserved the right to appoint the mayors).

Towards the end of the 1930s Wilhelm Frick lost favour irreversibly
within the Nazi Party after a power struggle involving attempts to
resolve the lack of coordination within the Reich government.
For
example, in 1933 he tried to restrict the widespread use of
"protective custody" orders that were used to send people to
concentration camps, only to be begged off by SS chief
Heinrich Himmler. His power
was greatly reduced in 1936 when Hitler named Himmler chief of all
German police forces. This effectively united the police with the
SS and made it virtually independent of Frick's control, since
Himmler was responsible only to Hitler. A long-running power
struggle between the two culminated in Frick being replaced by
Himmler as interior minister in 1943.

The replacement of Wilhelm Frick by Heinrich Himmler as Reich
interior minister did not reduce, however, the growing
administrative chaos and infighting between party and state
agencies. Frick was then appointed to the ceremonial post of
Protector
of Bohemia and Moravia. Prague, the capital
of the protectorate, where Frick used ruthless methods to counter
dissent, was one of the last Axis-held
cities to fall at the end
of World War II in Europe.

Trial and execution

The body of Wilhelm Frick after his
execution.

Frick was
arrested and tried before the International Military
Tribunal at Nuremberg, where he was the only defendant
besides Rudolf Hess who refused to
testify on his own behalf. His role in formulating the
Enabling Act as Minister of the Interior, the later Nuremberg Laws (as co-author with Wilhelm Stuckart) and as controller of
German concentration camps
led to his conviction for planning, initiating and waging wars of
aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Frick was
accused of being one of the highest persons responsible for the
existence of the concentration camps.Wilhelm Frick was sentenced to
death on 1 October 1946, and was hanged
about two weeks later on 16 October. Of his execution, journalist
Howard K.Smith wrote:

The sixth man to leave his prison cell and walk with
handcuffed wrists to the death house was 69-year-old Wilhelm
Frick.He entered the execution chamber at 2.05 a.m., six
minutes after Rosenberg had been pronounced dead.He
seemed the least steady of any so far and stumbled on the
thirteenth step of the gallows.His only words were, "Long
live eternal Germany," before he was hooded and dropped through the
trap.

A legalistic follower, rather than an initiator, Frick the
servant increasingly lost favour with his master, apparently
because he misunderstood the basic nature of the Fuhrer's
governance. Whereas the Third Reich thrived on inconsistencies,
rivalries, and constant evolutionary change, Frick's juristic mind
longed for order and legal stabilization. The incongruity was
insuperable and it was thus logical enough
that in 1943 the minister, whose share of practical power had kept
diminishing at a pitiful rate, ultimately even lost his official
post. Udo Sautter, Canadian Journal of History

As chief of all police forces, Himmler was technically
responsible to Wilhelm Frick, the minister of the Interior, but in
practice answered only to Hitler.[1]